We are going to discuss all these features in depth below, but first, let’s look in pricing.

Primary Capabilities

Getresponse’s feature set is arguably one of the most comprehensive on the market.

Not only does it provide all the key stuff you’d expect from an email advertising platform – list templates, hosting, autoresponders, analytics and so forth, but as mentioned previously, it’s been expanding the attribute set to the point at which it’s morphing into an all-in-one / CRM-style marketing platform.

The inquiry is if Getresponse is a jack of all trades and master of none – let us drill down to the key qualities to learn.

Customer Support

Up until quite recently Getresponse support was amongst the most comprehensive available for email advertising tools: the firm offered phone support together with live chat support, email service and assorted online tutorials / tools.

Regrettably, the phone support has now been discontinued. Instead you are going to need to use live chat (24/7) or email service. To be fair, most similar e-marketing platform providers only offer these two stations – if phone service is a deal-breaker for you you may wish to contemplate Aweber, which still provides it (you can read our Aweber review here).

Concerning the caliber of Getresponse service, I have not had to use it very often (a fantastic thing) but once I have I’ve discovered it for a small mixed bag (less of a fantastic thing). Some of those live chat service I have received has been outstanding, and I have not needed to wait too much time to talk to a broker; the email service .

Some of the feedback I have from our readers will indicate that there do need to be improvements made concerning the quality of support Getresponse offer. Much like a lot of these kinds of businesses, I anticipate it boils down to that you get daily. Php Email Marketing Software Free

Analytics

Getresponse offers some very comprehensive analytics and reporting choices. You get all the basics of course – open rate, click-through, unsubscribe rates and so forth – but in addition to that you will find some very nifty features Which Are worth a particular mention, specifically:

‘one-click segmentation’: the choice to spot people who did not participate with an e-newsletter you sent and set them in a section of subscribers that you can then email again with a different variant of the e-newsletter

‘metrics over time’: you can find out exactly when a lot of your readers do it in your emails, and time your prospective mailouts according to this information

’email ROI’: by incorporating some tracking code into your post-sales page on your site, you can discover how effectively (or not!) Your email campaigns are driving earnings, and workout your return on investment in email advertising.

Per-user info – you can click one of your subscribers and see in which they signed from, where they are located and which emails they’ve opened in the past.

Mailchimp and Aweber offer some similar reporting performance (particularly around sales monitoring ) but Getresponse’s reporting tool is definitely one of most featured on the market (it surely trounces the stats options provided by Mad Mimi and Campaign Monitor).

Templates

So far so good with Getresponse, but in regards to templates, Getresponse arguably drops down a little.

Unfortunately, the templates provided out of the box seem a bit dated; they aren’t as attractive as those provided by Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor (and that I slightly prefer Aweber’s offering here also ).

On the plus side, the templates are very tweakable – you can change fonts, designs and imagery easily enough with all the controls provided; and naturally there is nothing to stop you designing your HTML email template and importing the code for this.

Furthermore, there are tons of templates to choose from — over 500 — and they are presented in easy-to-understand classes, therefore it is generally pretty straightforward to find a good starting point to get a template and then edit it before you are happy with the plan.

If you are really unhappy with the templates offered by Getresponse, there is also the option of buying a template from a third party supplier such as Theme Forest.

Another thing worth pointing out regarding Getresponse’s templates is the assortment of RSS-to-email applications options aren’t so extensive (just 11 templates are provided – well short of the 700+ available for regular newsletters!) And some of them played up a bit for me when I tested them in Outlook (2010). I finally found something that worked for me, but I think that there are definitely a few improvements that could be created in this area. Php Email Marketing Software Free

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters which are delivered to your subscribers at intervals depending on you personally — you can put them up so that instantly after somebody signals up to a mailing list, they receive a welcome message in the business; a week after they can receive a discount deal for a number of your products or services; 3 months later they could receive an invitation to follow you on social media. And so on.

Getresponse’s autoresponder functionality is a key selling point – it offers among the most comprehensive feature sets available.

You can send time-based or action-based messages; time-based options include cycles such as the example above, and action-based messages can be triggered by user actions or advice, for example:

Opens

clicks

contributors to certain lists

changes connected preferences

completed transactions / goals

birthdays

changes in user information

Recently Getresponse launched a brand new version of their new autoresponder functionality, known as’Marketing Automation.’

This permits you to make automation workflows with a drag and drop builder – you basically set up an’automation flowchart’ that instructs Getresponse what to do if a user opens a particular offer, clicks on a specific link etc..

This type of performance goes way beyond what has traditionally been available from autoresponders, and allows you to create a user journey which can be customised to the nth degree.

For a fast overview I’d suggest taking a look at Getresponse’s video overview for Marketing Automation.

It is important to note, however, these more innovative marketing automation features are only available to the pricier programs – the’Guru’ plan and up. Php Email Marketing Software Free

Landing page Builder

Online advertising campaigns which make use of landing pages will usually create far more leads in the event, rather than simply directing individuals to some (cluttered!) Site, they tip users to attractive’squeeze pages’ containing clear info and a tidy, well-designed data capture type.

Getresponse provides something very useful in this respect that the majority of its competitors don’t: a landing page creator (and one that’s mobile-friendly to boot).

Products like Campaign Monitor and Aweber require you to make use of a third party (and non invasive ) landing page generating tool like Unbounce or Instapage; Mailchimp lately introduced a landing page performance but it is yet to become as sophisticated at Getresponse’s.

However, unless you are on a Getresponse’Pro’,’Max’ or’Enterprise’ plan, the Getresponse landing page functionality is rather limited: you can just create 1 landing page, which can only be displayed 1,000 times per month.

Additionally, and very importantly, you can’t utilize the landing page A/B testing performance on the cheapest Getresponse program (whereby the system indicates a sample of your users different variations of your landing page, computes conversion rates, and finally rolls out the top performing landing page mechanically ).

If you’re serious about landing pages – and they’re unquestionably a useful attribute – then it is definitely worth considering among the costlier Getresponse plans.

You may purchase the Landing Pages attribute as an add-on to get an additional $15 a month, however very frustratingly, although the add-on permits you to display an infinite amount of landing pages to prospective subscribers, it does not consist of A/B testing.

Accordingly, if I was considering the Getresponse landing page performance, I wouldn’t bother with this rather half-baked add-on: I would just go for one of the pricier plans (which I guess is exactly what Getresponse would like you to do!) .

Mobile-Responsive Design

Getresponse was ahead of its rivals for quite a while with its responsive email design performance, which automatically adjusts your e-newsletter’s template so that if an individual is reading it on a mobile device, the design and fonts will be optimized for the device in question.

Most competing products have captured up on this now, and extend responsive email templates, but Getresponse is far better than many similar goods when it comes to displaying a reactive preview of your e-newsletter – you simply hit on a’cellphone preview’ button to get an instant snapshot of your email resembles on a smartphone (see picture right).

Not only this but you can’reverse’ the smartphone preview around, so you may preview what your email looks like when the screen is used in either portrait or landscape mode. Php Email Marketing Software Free

Customer Relationship Management

Among the most frustrating facets of using many famous CRM tools is the necessity to export information to CSV and straight back into your email marketing tool in order to perform mailouts (or the necessity to export data from your email marketing tool in your CRM to add leads to it).

When I saw Getresponse recently introducing a new CRM feature into their plans I was intrigued – this could possibly eliminate all that info exporting and exporting, and keep everything neatly in 1 place.

Initially I was not that impressed with all the Getresponse CRM tool since you could only use it in order to perform rather basic jobs: you could create sales pipelines, add contacts to them and monitor activity (emails, phone calls etc.) with these contacts manually.

But recently Getresponse have upped their game a bit on this front. The CRM is now integrated with all Getresponse’s email marketing operation and you can add users into a CRM pipeline according to their action (form completions, email opens, purchases etc.) or activate autoresponders based on the accession of a new contact to a pipeline stage.

An example of how to use this operation is as follows:

It is possible to add a contact to a particular point on a revenue pipeline based on the page of your website they completed a form on;

you could then send a automated email tailored to this pipeline stage a couple of days afterwards;

and based on the actions they took with regard to this email (clicking on a particular link ) you could automatically move them onto another stage of the pipeline and automatically invite them to a webinar.

It is very clever stuff, and that I can not think of any email advertising product offering such a tight integration between autoresponders and CRM pipelines. For this type of functionality you normally must look at committed — and more expensive — CRM products like Salesforce and Infusionsoft.

But, it is not all fantastic news about the CRM front there are some big things missing out of Getresponse’s CRM feature set.

The most glaring omission is email activity monitoring. Other CRM packages allow you to bcc a dropbox email address any time you send an email to a lead or client; doing this keeps a record of this communication from the contact’s history. There’s currently no method of doing so with all the Getresponse CRM, nor is there an simple way to send one-to-one mails to leads or clients.

And strangely, when you click on a contact in a deal pipeline, you can’t see their contact activity — i.e., the actions they’ve taken (open, clicks etc.) with regard to previous communications that you’ve sent to your leads are not displayed. To observe this, you have to go out of the CRM section of Getresponse, hunt for your contact in the contacts section and click in their details. But guess what? Doing so doesn’t exhibit their deal history.

Task management is non-existent too: unlike dedicated CRM tools, there’s no way to assign tasks to other group members.

Finally, adding contacts into a pipeline stage is tough. You have to add contacts to a list , then go to the CRM pipeline, include a bargain and hunt your lists to receive the contact you just added. From a usability point of view this is very clunky and time consuming. You should just have the ability to add a bargain right to a pipeline and then input the contact details of your lead or client at that point.

So as things stand, the Getresponse CRM is a bit half-baked. However, it is a new attribute and the things it could perform on the automation aspect is impressive. I am hopeful that this feature gets developed over time since done right, it is possibly a game-changer for entrepreneurs and SMEs.

Webcasts

Getresponse recently introduced the ability to host webinars on the platform.

Given that webinars are generally utilized as a lead-generation tactic, the notion of getting your email database and your webinar tool under the same roof is extremely attractive.

The pricing is also very aggressive too by comparison to based webinar solutions. By way of instance, among the leading webinar providers, Gotowebinar, fees $199 per month to sponsor webinars with as much as 500 attendees; you can actually do the same (plus a whole lot more) with Getresponse for $165 (as long as your list size is below 25,000).

With respect to attendee limits, the Getresponse’Pro’ program allows you to sponsor a webinar with up to 100 participants; the’Max’ program’s cap is 500.

You can also buy webinars functionality as a add on to a more affordable plan: $40 a month buys you a 100 attendees limitation, $99 per month buys you a 500 attendees limit. It isn’t clear what your choices are if you will need to host bigger scale webinars compared to that however.

A couple of Getresponse webinar features worth flagging up as being especially useful are:

The fact that your attendees do not have to install any software to attend the webinars

one-click record of your webinars

screensharing functionality

free online storage for playback documents

Ultimately webinar performance is potentially a very helpful feature to have sitting on your e-marketing arsenal and its inclusion as a characteristic provides Getresponse a very significant edge over its key competitors, especially when you believe you could link it in using a built-in CRM tool (more about that in a moment). Php Email Marketing Software Free

Email Deliverability

The email deliverability rate – the proportion of e-newsletters sent that successfully hit inboxes – is obviously a very important thing to look at when selecting an email marketing tool.

Not all email advertising providers are that forthright about their deliverability rates; but Getresponse seems pretty open about this, with this to say about it on their site:

At GetResponse we are often asked about the quality of our deliverability rate. Because deliverability depends on many factors, including the content of your messages, the deliverability rate could vary for each mailing. For all our clients collectively, nevertheless, we’re proud to say our overall deliverability rate now stands at 99%.

Obviously you’re going to have to choose the organization’s word for this, but assuming it’s true, it is a good speed and inspires confidence that the vast majority of emails you send using Getresponse will reach their receivers.

What’s more, Getresponse really provides you the deliverability rate of each message on your email analytics – this is something that I have not encountered on competing goods’ metrics. A thumbs up for this.

I do need to pull Getresponse up on something concerning deliverability nevertheless: to ensure a high deliverability rate, it is advisable to use a platform called DKIM email authentication. You are able to use DKIM using Getresponse – but just on the costlier Getresponse’Max’ programs.

Though I’ve not struck any deliverability problems utilizing the cheaper plans, competing products do not force you to invest in a more expensive plan to avail of this feature — it would be useful to see Getresponse becoming more generous here.

Email Opt-in

There are two methods you can use to add subscribers to a mailing list: having a’single opt-in’ or even a’double opt-in’ process.

If you utilize a single opt-in process, the person registering to your mailing list is added to your mailing list the moment they hit the submit button on your sign up form.

With a double opt-in procedure, the individual signing up to your list is sent via an email containing a confirmation link that s/he have to click before being subscribed.

The main benefit of a single sampling procedure is that it makes it really easy for users to subscribe to your mailing list; it also generally increases conversion speed and so the number of readers on your record. A double opt-in process is better for verifying the folks subscribing to a list are using real email addresses and contributes to cleaner data and more precise stats (because open rates etc. are calculated based on a list comprising only email addresses).

The fantastic news here is that Getresponse allows you to take advantage of either opt-in approach – this is not the case with all competing products. So a thumbs up for Getresponse for being flexible about this.

Collecting Data

There are two methods to use types in Getresponse – you can either add a HTML form that you style yourself, or you could style your kind in Getresponse (choosing from a decent selection of templates and tweaking them to match your site design). If you go for the latter route, you can add the form to your website using a snippet of code that runs some Javascript to display your type — that can be shown in a variety of different formats (for instance inline, pop-up or slide-up).

You are probably thinking that all this sounds pretty good — but to be honest, I think there’s a great deal of room for advancement with regard to Getresponse form templates.

For a start, they are not responsive (i.e., they won’t resize themselves automatically to match the device they’re being watched on).

Additionally, no controllers are offered by Getresponse to change forms on or off on specific devices or individual pages of your site. In the light of Google’s brand new strategy to pop-ups (where sites can have a hit in search results if they display’intrusive interstitials’ on cellular devices) this really is a small concern.

To circumvent this, I generally avoid using Getresponse form templates, and make do using HTML embeded forms that I design myself, and for popups I connect my Getresponse to a growth-hacking tool named Sumo (that allows me to change pop-ups off for mobile users, as well as display forms precisely as I’d like to and onto the webpages I want). Php Email Marketing Software Free

UI Experience

On the whole, Getresponse is pretty simple to use. It is certainly easy enough to do all the fundamentals: import contacts, create campaigns, setup autoresponders and check numbers and the interface is really clean and intuitive.

In terms of how it stacks up against its competitors in this respect, I would argue that Campaign Monitor is a tiny bit more user friendly, and Mailchimp has a slicker user interface (although one which makes locating certain functionality a bit tricky at times).

One place I think that could be significantly better from a user-friendliness standpoint is the Getresponse e-newsletter editor.

Whilst its drag-and-drop approach does in theory provide a very flexible way to make blocks of articles and move them around an e-newsletter, in practice it is quite clunky to use and can lead to accidental deletion of material, or positioning of it at the wrong part of the e-newsletter.

If you can get your head around it, and practice using it a bit, it does make for a useful instrument – it’s just that the execution of it might be somewhat better.

Also, as described above, the CRM tool could be better from a usability point of view adding contacts to deals can be unnecessarily difficult.

Free Trial

The 30-day free trial that Getresponse provides is fully functional and the free trial is not contingent upon providing credit card details.

This makes it possible to avoid that annoying”oops I forgot I signed up for that trial and today I am getting charged for a product I don’t use” scenario.

The only down side to the free trial is the fact that it restricts the amount of readers you can send to to 1000. It would be good if that could be raised a little, as it would help potential users try the tool out in more’real world’ situations.

Pricing

There are three main sorts of Getresponse pricing strategy -‘Email’,’Pro’ and’Max’ — and within each of these, several additional kinds of strategy to pick from (all based on record size).

Significant discounts are available if you pay upfront for 12 or 24 weeks of service (18% and 30% respectively) — these are much more generous than most competing platforms. Php Email Marketing Software Free

Distinctions of Each Strategy

Each of the Getresponse plans cover the important basics — key features include:

The capacity to export, grow and host an email database

a wide range of templates

autoresponder functionality

responsive email designs

split testing

in-depth reporting

RSS / blog to-email functionality

comprehensive segmentation options

social sharing programs

There are a number of differences between the’Email’,’Pro’ and’Max’ plans but for me the key ones are:

Landing pages – you can only avail of landing pages which enable split testing and unlimited views if you are on a’Guru’ plan or higher

Webinars – this functionality is not accessible whatsoever around the’Email’ strategy and the amount of webinar attendees is capped for the’Pro’ and’Max’ plans at 100, 500 respectively (it is uncertain what the limitation is on the’Enterprise’ plan).

Users – you can have just one user account on the’Email’ program; by comparison you receive 3 on’Guru’, 5 ‘Max’ and 10 on’Enterprise’.

Pricing Vs Competitors

So long as you are pleased to use one of those entry-level’Email’ programs, the pay-per-month Getresponse programs are on the whole cheaper than those provided by many of its key competitors, especially in case you have a fairly high number of email addresses on your database.

For example, in case you have a mailing list comprising between 9,000 and 10,000 records that you wish to send an unlimited number of mails each month to, you might discover that hosting it using Getresponse costs $65 monthly.

This is:

$4 a month cheaper compared to Aweber

$10 cheaper a month than Mailchimp

$84 a month cheaper than Campaign Monitor*

Decision Campaign Monitor’s pricing structure is dependent not just the number of email addresses on your database however on how many emails you send per month too. If you’re delighted to set a limit on the number of emails delivered via Campaign Monitor (in the case above, to 50k emails), you can expect to pay a monthly fee of $89, nevertheless considerably greater than Getresponse’s.

The sole well-known service that I could think of that comes from considerably more affordable is Mad Mimi, which charges $42 per month to host up to 10,000 email addresses (note however that the functionality provided by Mad Mimi is nowhere near as broad as Getresponse’s or really the other products mentioned above).

It’s also worth pointing out that Mailchimp offers thinner pricing bands, meaning that depending on how big your list, it may occasionally be a slightly cheaper alternative than Getresponse.

At the database end of things, Getresponse’s pricing is pretty competitive too – you can host a database containing 1,000 email addresses for $15 per month using Getresponse, compared to $29 with Aweber; $59 on Campaign Monitor (unlimited send).

Mailchimp’s monthly fee for a 1,000 recording database will be the like Getresponse’s; and Mad Mimi provides a slightly cheaper, if less operational offering for $12 per month.

Two final things to be aware of about the pricing :

Some competing suppliers — notably Mailchimp – provide completely free account for users with a small number of records (but these do not supply the entire range of features that you get on a paid plan).

As stated before, if you’re prepared to pay upfront for 1 or two decades, you can avail of significant discounts the other competitors don’t yet provide.

So the most important thing is that Getresponse is pretty competitive in the pricing section. However, what about attributes? Php Email Marketing Software Free

Conclusion

Getresponse represents among the more cost-effective ways to host and communicate using an email .

It is also among the most interesting products of its type – because it provides email marketing, landing pages, CRM and webinars all under a single roof. It’s difficult to think of any rival product that offers this’all around’ proposal, and it is what continues to persuade us to utilize it for Style Factory’s email advertising.

Some improvements to Getresponse do need to be made nonetheless, especially where the email programmer is concerned – its own drag and drop interface is much more fiddly and not as responsive than it should be. A lot of improvements can be made into the data capture forms also, especially for consumers wishing to display them on mobile devices.

And from what I gather from reader opinions, there are developments which could be made into the service offering.

Overall though I speed Getresponse very tremendously – you get substantial bang for your dollar with this product.

Listed below are a Couple of pros and cons of utilizing Getresponse overall:

Benefits of Getresponse

So long as you’re happy to use an’Email’ program, Getresponse is more affordable than most of its key competitors (in certain cases, substantially so) whilst offering as much, or even more functionality as them.

The discounts you get when paying for a couple of decades of support are very generous – you’ll be hard pushed to find similar reductions in costs from key opponents.

Its webinar functionality is a USP – something that is not provided by any products that are similar.

Its own reporting and comprehensive split testing features are strong.

Getresponse is transparent regarding deliverability rates, publishing characters on its own site and supplying deliverability data for person e-newsletters you send.

It provides an extremely flexible approach to information segmentation – more elastic than many competing goods.

It allows you to add subscribers to your mailing list on either a single-opt in and a double opt-in basis.

It transmits responsive emails and permits you to preview smartphone versions of your e-newsletters really readily.

It includes a useful landing page founder – but keep in mind that you have to be on a more expensive plan to get the fully functional version of the.

You are able to test out all of its features free for 30 days without needing to input credit card details.

Disadvantages of Getresponse

The drag and drop interface for designing mails can be a little bit on the fiddly side.

The information capture forms supplied are not responsive and you can not control when and where they’re displayed on your website.

CRM performance has to be improved considerably before it could be thought of as a replacement for a standalone CRM merchandise.

There is a limited selection of RSS-to-HTML e-newsletter templates provided.

You can just use’web-safe’ fonts from e-newsletters, which can make the templates seem marginally less slick than those provided by competing goods.

The pricing arrangement is a little confusing, with customers having to pay something of a superior to access the landing page creator tool.

The free trial limits the amount of readers you’ll be able to send messages to to 1000.

The landing page add-on doesn’t let you execute A/B evaluations, meaning that so as to obtain this functionality you are forced to use a more expensive program than you might like.

DKIM authentication is only available on the more expensive’Max’ plans.